


Hill 60

by yungdreams



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Feelings Mostly, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, No Sex, Old Souls, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 09:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yungdreams/pseuds/yungdreams
Summary: Bucky and Steve try to go home.





	Hill 60

**Author's Note:**

  * For [libraralien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/libraralien/gifts).



> happy birthday! i think this kinda diverged from the original very simple feelings thing i was trying to write and i hope you still enjoy it

When Bucky and Steve took it upon themselves to go around Brooklyn, they hadn’t fully thought about what a trial it would have been for them. It was just something they settled upon, like everything else they’d ever done side by side.

When the two of them were little, two blocks down and three blocks over from Bucky’s dad’s place, there was Mr. Goldblatt’s apartment on the floor level, and the wizened older man used to sit and stare out onto the passing traffic of the Brooklyn interstice. A boy from school said Goldblatt was lame and walked with a crutch, but he’d fought in the war, and he had a gun, and he’d show it to you if you asked about it, he was just glad to have the company, that’s all. And off they had went, Bucky tall and lanky, already a strip of muscle excitable and dashing, pulling along skinny little Steve, coughing all the way.

He had been a doughboy. His helmet hung on the wall, like some old tin camper’s plate. The old gun was a Springfield Armory rifle, nothing more than a club now after the bolt had been shattered. Every war tale the soldier told was nothing like what they had ever heard before. Goldblatt told the bits of the Great War he remembered, out of order; the black dirt falling as powdery clods on their helmets, the sounds of artillery fire like neverending thunder, the Marines of the 5th coming over the hill at Belleau Wood like the knights of Charlemagne. The two kids had left bright-eyed, ideas of glory rattling around in their heads, bright embers that could not be extinguished by the scolding of their parents, or the fists of the neighborhood bullies. Those were the days before his mom succumbed to pneumonia, before Steve had to move to the Lower East Side.

Then Bucky grew, and Steve grew, and Bucky grew, and Bucky grew, and Bucky grew. For the first time in forever, they grew apart. Then rejoined together. Then torn apart again, until now. War is cruel like that, isn’t it?

Brooklyn was so different nowadays. Their park was gone, their alleys gone, cannibalized into larger and larger projects, to say nothing of the big-city areas that had grown so much more bright and stark. Bucky looked like he was on the verge of tears when he faltered to find where his dad’s apartment had been, but luckily Steve was there to lead him by the hand. He had been away so long, there was so much he had forgotten!

But with everything that Steve could recall, his steps grew a little slower and uncertain. It brought Steve closer and closer to tears, and finally he sat in a bench with his face in his hands with Bucky next to him and let him cry and cry and cry, letting himself be awash in memories that pierced his heart over and over. Bucky was so afraid of forgetting, but he was the opposite. They couldn’t truly bolster each other through it all. But that was the lesson war’d taught everyone, wasn’t it?

Bucky’s dad’s place was gone too. There was a shop serving cubanos just across the street, though. That might’ve evened it out a little bit.

At Coney Island, it all came rushing back in the cold wind and cafe au lait sand, where the waves lapped lightly at their toes and the edge of the city itself sloped gracefully into an endless blue expanse that would serve to pique the interest of any trouble-seeking child. Under the boardwalk they found the place where Bucky had his first kiss, immortalized in bones of concrete where there was once wood, and they shared a moment that they prayed was away from time itself. There was still the decayed carnivalesque, the salt-caked wind that made Coney Island feel primordial even when they were so young.

After a while, New York felt painful to them, all the bits they’d remembered and traced so well, neatly chopped up and changed with the encroachment of gentry, strangling the character that felt so vibrant and alive. They yearned for the warmth of a real limb and encountered only its cold prosthesis, functional, stronger, better in every way for all the wrong things. It was only by a shred of luck that Steve had remembered the street corner and the dogleg alley where Goldblatt’s wide window had once sat. Brooklyn was so different; there was a wild notion that they might find dreams of themselves in places they’d never been.

Bucky’s memory was still pockmarked with holes and moments that made him turn and whimper in his sleep. He was prone to staying in the blind spots of windows and training his eyes on the puddles on the water, on trees that were thick and round enough for emergency cover, through open areas surrounded by people where any one of them could be hiding knives, snubnoses or stun guns. He didn’t like summer rains and dirt roads; it reminded him of the marshes in Belarus where they lured and slaughtered the partisans, as if at any moment a bright ray of sunshine might turn the ground under them to mud, and bring their truck down with it.

Bucky didn’t remember, but Steve had remembered, even being a little mousy kid that he was, that there was a moment where Bucky had knocked over a glass, and Goldblatt had flinched. Nowadays, Bucky flinched just like that. But when he did, Steve squeezed his metal hand, hard enough even for him to feel. It was the only thing that made him feel at peace these days.

There were lessons to be learned here, answers he’d been made to forget long ago and was rediscovering for himself. That chasing ghosts was always painful, even if it gives you strength. He didn’t yearn for the days of being young, and neither did Goldblatt, who must’ve been scared and alone in the trenches, a young kid crying his eyes out under a hail of powdery black rain. The glory was telling his story, even if it was so painful that it made him flinch.

That the past was the past, and now is now, and they were caught up in it, being pulled and buffeted along, a foe neither of them could best nor befriend. That they were together again, and not apart. That they were older, wiser, a little more afraid for one another, even if there was nothing herculean enough to stop either of them on his own.

Outside Ypres, at Hill 60, the two soldiers walked along the emerald grass, where the wind murmured between vermilion leaves of the squat beech trees. They traced the lumpy hills and craters where weapons of war had scooped great mounds of earth into an unfamiliar terrain, scars that had taken a century to fill and bristle with life again. The artillery shells must have fallen like the tears of God.


End file.
